River Gallery Artists

Matthew Gallagher| ARTIST STATEMENT
Discovery is the key word. No matter what media I’m working with, the process must be experimental, generative, and uncover more questions than answers. As an artist, I think of myself as a facilitator of reactions. My work is very formulaic, in that I design specific variables and then process them with some sort of chance influence to create a piece. It’s an empowering spiritual practice for me. It allows me to pursue hypotheses and experiment in a non-institutional framework.
I think of my encaustic works as meditations. I use a cumulative, batch-based process of layering and color selection. There are infinite choices to make when using color in these pieces. It is a constant discovery to see one layer interacting with the previous. The piece changes dramatically with each layer added. Sometimes it does what I want, sometimes I am completely surprised at the outcome. The most recent evolution in this series has been more directed toward structural development of the substrate materials.

Dawn Tekler| ARTIST STATEMENT This encaustic series is an experimental departure from my conventional photography. I was initially drawn to document the scene or subject matter, but did not find the final presentation in traditional photographic form satisfactory. Wanting more out of the work, I started investigating the deconstruction of the photographs, collage and encaustic wax.
I am drawn to the idea of encasing the subject, so it can be studied at a later date. This is a theme that is carried over from my voyeuristic approach to my photography.
Through the layering of wax, adding color and texture I aim to create an environment which allows the viewer to bring to it, their own story and hopefully enjoyment of the journey and also with anticipation invite the viewer back over and over again to find different elements not noticed in the original viewing.

Lainard Bush | ARTIST STATEMENT
While my paintings share a kinship with the primal art of tribal cultures and the sacred geometries of spiritual traditions and reflect the circuitries of the modern Cyber Age, and while current trends and art theories are of intellectual interest to me, when it comes to my own art and the process of its creation, my primary inspiration and motivation to paint originates from deep within.
I usually begin painting without much forethought. There is little planning other than the marking off of a simple grid, which serves as an anchor and skeletal framework. What follows is an organic process of rapidly building up and removing layers of color. Guided by the grid, the gestural application of paint alternates with repeated masking. As I become deeply immersed in this process, fully engaged, and sharply focused, my awareness of time and self vanishes. Gradually the grid evolves into intricate patterns, which demarcate smaller worlds within the macrocosm of the canvas. I continue refining until the painting arrives at completion in a state of dynamic balance.
My paintings can be viewed as embodiments of an aesthetic paradise, both in idea and experience. The original meaning of the word paradise was walled garden. Like a beautiful and complex garden, each completed canvas is a self-contained universe that invites one to take a visually journey of playful exploration. The painting's intricate patterns, in a rhythmic, serial fashion, urge the eye forward across the luminous and textured surface and into depths containing lushly colored, highly detailed, and precisely composed passages. Should that journey include a glimmer of paradise, it has been a journey of revelation as well.

Chadd Lacy | ARTIST STATEMENT
This body of work draws influence from nature, as well as mans effect on it. The vessels are reminiscent of a carved piece of wood, utilizing both the look of bark and the underlying pattern found on the heartwood of a tree. Other works present the raincloud as an object in a domestic setting. They create a quiet scene of the outside world inside the space where they are presented. In all this body aims to use nature and growth as a tool to create functional forms. It balances untouched natural form with that of carved, man-made form.

Terry Klausman | Statement:
My work incorporates a graceful curvilinear line. I like the organic/feminine contrast with the very masculine medium. Rigid and geometric, structural steel plays a perfect foil to the feminine design I impart to it.

Landscape images are important to me in the way that seeing the representation of a place outside my body stirs my feelings on the inside. In the past few years I have assigned value to these images based on the emotions felt rather than to articulating any certain place. I pour over the photographs I’ve collected from where I’ve lived, I go through my old plein air work; or observational on-site paintings, and I conjure the images of places that have mattered to me. These memories of things like where I grew up or where something life-changing happened to me are the most important, I draw on them to convey a meaning and a mood.
My intent is for the color and tone to carry the emotional message of an image, I have worked on refining the shapes of nature, quieting and subtracting from them, to create an atmosphere of meditation and simplicity. This is where the meeting point of my personal connection to the painting can mingle and exist with a more universal emotive conveyance to the viewer. If I have ever experienced love, joy, loss, connection or disconnection, they have always occurred in this place, but they are not necessarily of it. The paintings are there to occupy the space in between.